ENGL 2600-501
Critical Introduction to Literature
Summer 2022
Prof. Baird
Analysis Paper
Shylock:
Historical Symbol of Forced Conversion
When do we
learn about forced conversion in school? When do we hear the numbers of
Catholics that were secretly Jewish? We don’t. We do, however, read
Shakespeare in high school. So, let’s
analyze The Merchant of Venice, and the role of Shylock, a Jewish
moneylender in Venice, playing the opposite of Antonio, a rich merchant who
defaults on his loan to the price of a pound of his own flesh. Our textbooks
tell us that Shylock is a villain, and we take it for face value because we
don’t know enough in high school to question it. Enter college, though: do we
know enough to challenge that Shylock was a product of mistreatment of the
Jewish people through the ages and not just a quintessential bad guy? I believe
we do. Shylock was type cast to fit a character that Shakespeare needed to
build a story built to make the Christian narrative the Hero, and the Jewish
narrative the Villain, so to further promote the antisemitic trope that still
exists today: Shylock’s anger and actions are justified.
So, let’s
break it down: consider moneylending. If we know nothing about the historical
aspects of moneylending at the period that Shakespeare was writing about (the
16th century), it may seem like no big deal. However, let me educate
you on some details about moneylending and usury, so as to illuminate the
topic. Usury is the act of moneylending with unethical loans to benefit the
moneylender. (Usury, 2021) Go look at how much your credit card is
charging you interest. Sound familiar? Now, the Catholic Church was banning
usury for Catholics at this time, but to create a loophole for people looking
to raise capital, they made it legal for Jews to practice moneylending, and
then simply borrowed money from them, while keeping their proverbial souls
spotless. Unfortunately, they also significantly restricted other Jewish
professions, essentially pigeonholing them into certain roles, as well as
segregating them to the Venetian Ghetto. (Dorn, 2016) Shylock was a moneylender
because that’s the job he was allowed to have, and he was gated behind
ghetto walls because that’s the home he was permitted to have.
We see that Antonio
excelled at verbally abusing Shylock, which Shylock points out to him when Antonio
comes knocking for a loan. He asks Antonio why he has called him a misbeliever,
a dog, and spit on his clothes? Antonio tells him yes, he has done these
things, and will do them again, but he still wants the money. This displays how
Christians expected the Jews to follow their created role while being
abused for it. In this moment, we can see Shylock attempting to put Antonio off
his search for money from his own coffers, but Antonio is overly confident in
his ships and his fortunes, and choses to take the loan with the bond of a pound
of flesh. Now, what would possess a man to take
a loan at the deadly cost of a pound of his own flesh? Antonio expects to be
charged interest, but perhaps the lack of interest and his own high
expectations in his future earnings place him in a position to feel confident
in his choices. (Roth, 2017)
When
you consider Shylock’s famous speech “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”,
we hear the frustration of the Jewish plight, and the lack of justice in their
causes. He ends his speech with “If
a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a
Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The
villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better
the instruction.”— Act III, scene I
Shylock
was promised a pound of flesh by his tormentor, and while the actual act of
cutting out the pound of flesh seems horrible, is this not what Christian lack
of mercy in one area of life (persecution of the Jews) contrasted with
Christian demand for mercy (in the courtroom) creates? We also have to consider
that in the courtroom, when Portia reminds Shylock that he is an alien to
Venice, and subject to a death penalty for endangering Antonio’s life, that
Jews didn’t even have citizenship to call their own.
To add to
Shylock’s insult, he loses his only daughter, Jessica, to a Christian suitor.
Judaism is a matrilineal ethnic group, meaning that family lines are passed
down through the women. (Freeman & Shurpin, n.d.) Losing his daughter to
Christianity is the equivalent of losing an arm of his family tree, or ending
it entirely, if she was his only child. While this may seem like a trivial
thing to our modern lens, this would be utterly devastating to a closed ethnic
group like the Jews and is significantly more important to the storyline than
we may have realized. This man lost his
family legacy, his amassed fortune (which she stole when she ran away) and his
child. This is no small thing. Children are also considered to be the ultimate
key to the future of Judaism, and this thought has persisted been for a very
long time, so when we see Shylock lose his daughter and his faith through
forced conversion, we see an empty shell of a man. He has nothing left.
Shylock
was a tragic character, cast in a comedy play meant to humorously engage the
English at a time when no Jews openly existed in England. They had all been
driven out in 1275, (British Library Board, 2020) and England already had a
long history with treating them badly. If he was a real character, his actions
would have been analyzed in the scope of what had happened to him through his
lifetime. The treatment he and his people endured through the centuries was and
still is utterly abominable. Shylock was justified in his anger. This does not
mean I am recommending that people should cut out pounds of flesh in exchange
for acts of antisemitic behavior, though. It shows that anger is a reasonable
response for the mistreatment he endured, which we have read since it was
penned down all those years ago. It shows how we have come to expect the Jew to
take the abuse, because even now we have schools teaching that he was the evil
to be found in these pages. Nazis used this play as antisemitic propaganda to
whip up frenzy in Germans. (Frank, 2016) This is how Kristallnacht happened.
This is how Auschwitz happened. How have we not learned to reframe his plight
and better ourselves from it?
Shylock has
taught me something I didn’t know before. Justifiable anger is having a sense
of moral outrage at the injustices of the world. Shylock was justified in his
anger by the treatment he and his people endured at the hands of Christianity.
He didn’t need a pound of flesh, though. He needed justice. But he wasn’t going
to get that. He instead lost everything he had and was forcibly removed from
his faith and placed in the very religious intuition that condemned him. This,
tragically, isn’t an isolated incident to Venice in the 16th
century, or England during the period when Jews were forced to convert or
leave. This happened in Polish monasteries during the Holocaust, and when they
were expelled from Spain in 1492. (The Converso History | Jewish Heritage
Alliance, 2020) History is riddled with the quiet statements of how many
Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or die. What we don’t see is a
concerted effort to destroy Christianity for their actions…because they didn’t
do that. Is this why we are surprised to see a Jew fight back and stand up to
the oppressor? Is this why throughout history Shylock has been labelled the
villain, despite the sympathetic tone Shakespeare penned in his pages?
Shylock
deserved his pound of flesh. Ultimately,
he is brought down by the quick wit of Portia and her argument that he can have
his pound, but no drop of blood may be spilled. This, and with the spirit of
the Inquisition hovering in the onlookers, he is cornered by the Courtroom and
forced to conversion. The Court goes far beyond its normal duty and delivers a
blow that it just one step above death. Shylock exits with nothing left to his
name. Christianity drove every ounce of righteous anger from him by taking his
religion and ethnicity, which is worth far more than his gold. This was the
ideal subject that the citizens of Vienna preferred: a Jewish man, emotionally beaten
into submission, unable to ever regain anger for his mistreatment for the rest
of his life.
When you
survey a room of people for what a “shylock” is, you get a mixed bag of
responses. (Shylock, n.d.) Many younger people have no idea at all. Some
think of a loan shark. People in their 50’s and 60’s think “moneylender”. And
then there is another view that’s older and scarier. These are the very elderly
who know it to be a Jewish slur, one with hatred and malice behind it. This
gave me pause in my research. It made me wonder at those who didn’t know the
history, those of my own generation who had no clue. Part of me felt relief
because we don’t carry as much of the antisemitism that is still alive and well
in the elderly, but another part of me was terrified that we might not know how
to tikkun olam (Hebrew for “repair the world”) when it comes to
antisemitism. I realized that I want Shylock to stop being the villain in
textbooks, and instead be seen as a historical figure remembered for forced
conversion. I want him to be remembered when people speak of courts stepping
beyond their bounds. His anger is the anger of millions reaching back into the
dawn of humankind, and his despair is theirs, too. I would have the new
generations learn what it means to remember the plight of the Jewish people
when they read of Shylock, and learn from it, not just for the sake of naive
high schoolers in English lit class, but for the hope of a kinder future.
References
Usury. (2021,
September 15). National Consumer Law Center.
https://www.nclc.org/issues/high-cost-small-loans/usury.html
Dorn, N. (2016, May 20). The
Consilia of Alessandro Nievo: On Jews and Usury in 15th Century Italy | In
Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress. Library of Congress.
https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2016/05/the-consilia-of-alessandro-nievo-on-jews-and-usury-in-15th-century-italy/
British Library Board. (2020). Expulsion
of Jews. British Library.
https://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item103483.html
shylock. (n.d.). TheFreeDictionary.Com.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/shylock
Frank, S. (2016, July 28). ‘The
Merchant of Venice’ perpetuates vile stereotypes of Jews. So why do we still
produce it? Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/07/28/stop-producing-the-merchant-of-venice/
Roth, E. (2017, March 8). The
Merchant of Venice. My Jewish Learning.
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-merchant-of-venice/
Freeman, T., & Shurpin, Y. (n.d.).
Why Is Jewishness Matrilineal? Chabad.Org. Retrieved August 1, 2022,
from
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/601092/jewish/Why-Is-Jewishness-Matrilineal.htm
The Converso History | Jewish Heritage
Alliance.
(2020, February 18). Jewish Heritage Alliance | In The Footsteps of Sefarad and
The Crypto Jews. https://jewishheritagealliance.com/the-converso-history/